The paper The BoomRoom: Mid-air Direct Interaction with Virtual Sound Sources from Jörg Müller, Matthias Geier, Christina Dicke and Sascha Spors will be presented at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2014.
In this paper we present a system that allows to “touch”, grab and manipulate sounds in mid-air. Further, arbitrary objects can seem to emit sound. We use spatial sound reproduction for sound rendering and computer vision for tracking. Using our approach, sounds can be heard from anywhere in the room and always appear to originate from the same (possibly moving) position, regardless of the listener’s position. We demonstrate that direct “touch” interaction with sound is an interesting alternative to indirect interaction mediated through controllers or visual interfaces. As an application of the system, we built a spatial music mixing room.
